Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research

With life expectancy increasing even as birth rates decline, the social and political consequences that demographic change entails are just some of the many issues addressed by scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock. Further projects are dedicated to the genetic, medical and biological aspects of ageing, and to the transformation of the human lifecycle. Still other work deals with the stability of family patterns in Europe over the centuries, the correlation between politics and demographic change, and the issue of how institutional, political and economic changes in Europe have affected the population.

First-borns are more likely to study more prestigious subjects at university such as medicine and engineering and can thus expect greater earnings than later-borns, who turn to arts, journalism and teaching.
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Eternal life lasts a very long time. Nevertheless, Ralf Schaible from the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock can already affirm that the freshwater polyp Hydra comes quite close to this ideal. In a long-term experiment initiated by the institute’s Director James W. Vaupel, he and his colleagues investigate why, under certain circumstances, Hydra doesn’t age.

Demographers are astounded at the way human mortality continues to drop. This trend started well over a hundred years ago. What used to be a statistical investigation of death rates has now developed into the science of longevity. This is what Jutta Gampe focuses on at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock.

Although everyone is talking about species protection, the lack of information about the species that need to be conserved can be quite shocking. To ensure that threatened animal species can be protected more effectively, the research team working with Dalia Amor Conde in the Conservation Demography Research Area of the Evolutionary Biodemography department headed by James W. Vaupel at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock is using special methods to gather important data about the lives of endangered animals.

The official statistics would have us believe that the "immigrant fate" guarantees a long life - and not only in Germany. According to official figures, the life expectancy of migrants far exceeds that of their fellow host-country citizens. Rembrandt Scholz, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, is investigating whether this is due to a healthy lifestyle or to errors in the recorded statistics.

Initially, Joshua R. Goldstein didn’t know exactly where Rostock was located. However, he was lured by the excellent reputation of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research – and recently took over as Director.

The higher the life expectancy in a society, the smaller the difference between the ages at which people will die. This relation can be described by a mathematical rule, as demographic data from many countries show. The relationship holds not only for very different human cultures and epochs, but similarly for non-human primates. Although separated by millions of years of evolution, for both humans and non-human primates the lives of females tend to be longer than the lives of males, suggesting deep evolutionary roots to the male disadvantage.

In almost all welfare states, life expectancy has been rising across the social strata, but more rapidly so in the higher social classes, resulting in remarkable life-expectancy differentials between the lower and the higher social classes over time. Contributing factors are not only poorer life and working conditions of the lower social classes, but also different smoking, drinking, and dietary habits. Analyses of historical data indicate that social life-expectancy differentials emerged as late as in the 18th and 19th centuries.
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Over the last 100 years, marked changes have occurred in Germany’s regional life-expectancy patterns. These include differences between the eastern and western part of the country and substantial shifts in the disparities between northern and southern Germany. By the beginning of the 20th century, the northern regions had the highest life expectancy, while the southern regions had the lowest levels. Today, this pattern is largely reversed. Research projects at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research look into the determinants of these mortality trends.
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For more than 150 years, the Western world has seen steady increases in average life expectancy. Controversy remains over why an increasing number of people is getting older and older. Germany divided and unified offers a unique opportunity to analyze the impact of changing living conditions on the development of mortality. After forty years of different political, social, and economic conditions as well as diverging life expectancy, the Fall of the Berlin Wall heralded the harmonization of living standards and the convergence of mortality levels between the two states formerly divided.
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Twenty years into German unification, one would have expected East-West differences in attitudes, living conditions and behavior to have gradually converged. While this holds for many areas of life, this does not apply to the family domain. Family structures and maternal employment patterns still differ radically between the two parts of the country. The panel study DemoDiff, monitored by the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, is getting to the bottom of these differences.
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How does demographic change impact the life cycle? How will public finances, private transfers or savings rates develop in the future? These questions are of vital importance to future societal arrangements and economic prospects and are thus tackled by research carried out at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock. This article shows how the individual economic life cycle is characterized in Germany, how it varies across regions and time, and how it impacts on the sustainability of public finances.
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The average life expectancy of men and women in Germany is highly fluctuating. Thus, a man, who lives in the southern prosperous regions, can expect to live nearly 77 years. A compatriot in an economically underdeveloped region, however, dies on average almost four years earlier. The reasons for these big differences are associated with economic, social and population structures of the regions and the quality of health care policy.
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The process of aging is more plastic than is commonly assumed and stipulated by classical theory on the evolution of aging. Deviations abound across the tree of life: There are species that do not age, and species that escape a steady increase in mortality. In some species, mortality even declines in certain phases of life. An analysis of these species’ life-history strategies may answer the question: How is it possible to live long?
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In many European states, fertility and marriage behavior have undergone significant changes over the last decades. In the wake of such processes, new demographic behavioral patterns evolve in some regions earlier or more strongly so than in others. An analysis of the spatial origins of these changes and their development over space and time provides new insights into the underlying factors.
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Population ageing, low fertility and increasing disparities of family forms and life course patterns in Europe have put the interdependencies between politics and demography at the centre of public debate. Studies of the newly founded Laboratory of Population and Policy / PoL at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) in Rostock show that demographic change may have a lasting effect on political systems both on the national and the European level.
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The political and socio-economic transition in Central and Eastern European countries was associated with a notable variation in mortality trends. Russia, Lithuania, and Estonia experienced large fluctuations and increases in mortality. Findings of a research project at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research demonstrate that improvements in population education in these countries counterbalanced the overall mortality increase.
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What impact do institutional and political factors have on the development of fertility and family dynamics in Europe? Comparative research conducted by the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research provides new insights into the complex relationship between family policy and childbearing behavior.
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Evolutionary demography is an emerging field at the cutting edge between demography, evolutionary ecology, life-history biology and mathematics. This interdisciplinary approach sheds light on the fundamental question of why we age by understanding the general mechanisms that shape the evolution of age-trajectories of mortality, fertility, growth, resource acquisitions and transfers.
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The transformation of East Germany's legal and political system has provided researchers with rich opportunities to study the effect of radical social change on fertility and life course patterns. From a family-research perspective, understanding the extent to which timing in marriage and family formation has changed since unification is particularly interesting. Despite a substantial increase following unification, the age at first parenthood in eastern Germany has not reached West German levels. Family- and fertility-related behavior in both parts of Germany also differs as to marriage patterns, living arrangements, and the employment behavior of mothers. Many aspects of demographic change in eastern Germany and Eastern Europe are not yet fully understood. The "Gender and Generations Program" will collect both individual level and contextual data for theoretically innovative, comparative analyses of changing family dynamics after system transformation.
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